Reuters/Ipsos poll: only 41% of Americans trust Facebook to obey privacy laws while 66% trust Amazon, 62% trust Google, 60% trust Microsoft, and 53% trust Apple
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Fewer than half of Americans trust Facebook (FB.O) to obey U.S. privacy laws … Tweets: @joshdickson40 and @sam__cash Tweets: Josh Dickson / @joshdickson40 : Fascinating to see Apple, which is the only one of these co's that incessantly talks about its stance on privacy (often to the detriment of its products), trailing Amazon by 23% and Google by 9% http://twitter.com/... Sam Cash / @sam__cash : Amazon has done an incredible job of putting a listening device in your home and retaining consumer trust http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Reuters/Ipsos poll is the opening data point in what became a multi-year measurement of Facebook's trust deficit: 41% of Americans say they trust the company to obey U.S. privacy laws, against 66% for Amazon, 62% for Google, 60% for Microsoft, and 53% for Apple. The striking detail inside the numbers is that Apple — the company that most aggressively markets privacy, often at the cost of product features — still trails Amazon by 13 points.
The follow-on coverage shows the deficit was not a momentary dip. A Harris poll later that year found only 22% of Americans trusting Facebook with personal information, Pew found 74% with little or no confidence in platforms preventing election misuse, and a 2021 survey put Facebook distrust at 72% — worse than TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, or YouTube.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters the privacy-policy fight with a measurable legitimacy problem: it is the only major platform below 50% on obeying U.S. privacy laws, handing regulators and lawmakers a ready-made public-opinion baseline for Facebook-specific scrutiny.
- Amazon holds the top trust score (66%) even though it has placed a listening device in millions of homes — as commentator Sam Cash noted, an achievement of retained consumer trust that insulates its voice-and-data ambitions from the skepticism hitting Facebook.
Second-order effects
- Rivals can now price off the gap: Apple's privacy positioning underperforms its messaging (trailing both Amazon and Google), which pressures it to prove privacy through architecture rather than advertising, while Microsoft's 60% gives it room to court enterprise buyers on compliance grounds.
- Facebook's advertisers and partners inherit the distrust — a brand buying Facebook inventory is associated with the least-trusted steward of personal data among the five majors, strengthening the case for shifting budgets toward higher-trust platforms.
Third-order effects
- The survey sequence — 41% here, 22% in the Harris poll, 74% low confidence in Pew's election work, 72% distrust by 2021 — indicates Facebook's trust problem hardened into a structural feature of the market rather than a recoverable scandal dip.
- If trust rankings keep tracking how companies monetize data rather than what they say about privacy, trust itself becomes competitive infrastructure: the durable asset separating ad-surveillance businesses from commerce and subscription businesses.
The trend: Public trust in major tech platforms is consolidating into a stable hierarchy defined by data practices rather than privacy marketing, with Facebook anchored at the bottom of every major U.S. survey from 2018 onward.